THE bulldozers have been at work in Darlington’s Northgate, bringing down a 1930s garage and revealing a name from the past – well, half a name at least.

The fancy paintwork on the brickwork reveals the top half of “Atkinson’s”, which is a name a lot of people have been conjuring with, judging by the number of calls to the Memories desk, and which was the name of a pre-war furniture shop.

The garage that has been bulldozed was last occupied by Hein Gericke’s motorbike shop. It was built in two stages in the 1930s on the gardens of the old Elmfield mansion which fronted onto Northgate.

This garage was Minories petrol station. The second stage of construction was a showroom for Minories in which they sold Sunbeam-Talbot cars, including Hillmans, Commers and Karriers. This second stage, built about 1939, butted up to the wall of the garage’s southerly neighbour – Atkinson’s – and so covered the fancy paintwork which spelt out the name of the furniture retailer.

Atkinson’s operated for a decade or so either side of the war, and its site is now occupied by the KwikFit tyre garage. Due to the demolition, its name has resurfaced for the first time in, we think, 76 years, so if you have any information about it, we’d love to hear.

BLOB With many thanks to Hugh Mortimer for the fine work with the camera.

WE have to come clean about the soap advert in one of last week’s pictures of Cockerton. It wasn’t on the Bearby sister’s shopfront at the top of Forcett Street, as we said – it was attached to the passing tram.

“Darlington's single deck tramcars had an advertising board at roof level, rather like a low parapet,” writes Colin Foster from Scarborough. “The Gossage's soap ad is above the end canopy and the panels on the side are blank, no doubt awaiting adverts to be affixed.”

Stephen Howarth of Sadberge has kindly sent in a picture of Forcett Street without a tram interfering with the view of the Bearby sisters’ shop to prove that there was no hoarding on the shopfront.

Colin Foster continues: “Oddly, although the angle of the trolley boom suggests the tram is moving leftwards across the picture, there is no silhouette of the driver at his controls. Perhaps Forcett Street was by the terminus and the driver has walked off to the other end, while the boom needs swinging over to change direction, a job carried out by the conductor.”

Which is brilliant deduction work, because when the electric trams started on June 1, 1904, they ran on four routes radiating from the town centre: one went up North Road and terminated where at Longfield Road where you can still see the turning circle; another went up Haughton Road and terminated at Barton Street at the foot of Albert Hill where the infamous throughabout is today; a third went up Yarm Road and terminated at Cobden Street, while the fourth went to Cockerton and terminated at Forcett Street.

Forcett Street was built in the 1860s for workers in the new Hopetown and North Road workshops, and it was demolished in 1962.

William Gossage of Widnes patented his silicated soap in 1854, and it became one of the most popular soaps in the country. The name disappeared during the Second World War when the Government banned all soap brands so that no one knew what they were washing with, although it is now owned by Unilever.

MEMORIES 238 in July showed Lord Lawson of Beamish on the front cover attending the 1960 Durham Miners’ Gala. He came from an illiterate Cumbrian fishing family, started down Boldon Colliery the day after his 12th birthday, but rose to represent Chester-le-Street for 30 years in the House of Commons, becoming Secretary of State for War in his friend Clement Attlee’s Cabinet in 1945, before becoming Britain’s first pitman peer in 1949.

A truly remarkable chap. But the next revelation is just as remarkable.

“He was my uncle,” says George Reynolds, the former chairman of Darlington Football Club. “My grandmother, Kate, was Jack Lawson’s sister.”

Indeed, when Kate married, she became a Tennick, and when Mr Reynolds was building the supersize football stadium on Neasham Road, his right hand man was his cousin, Richie Tennick, whose middle name is “Lawson” after the lord.

“You can check that on the court papers,” says Mr Reynolds, referring to the legal proceedings which saw him and his cousin jailed in 2005 following the collapse of the football club.

Mr Reynolds, whose own rise from an illiterate background is just as remarkable as Lord Lawson’s, has fond memories of his uncle, who died in 1965.

“He was a lovely man, a gorgeous fellow,” he says. “I remember him singing at a family funeral – he had a really good voice, way above everybody else.”

MANY thanks to everyone who has sent in memories of Frankie Vaughan. He definitely opened a Finefare in Darlington, and thousands of people seem to have been there. If you have any stories, please send them in over the weekend.

WE’VE recently been wandering around the Eppleby area to the south-west of Darlington, which has prompted a lovely letter from Wally Eland. He now lives in York, but he was born in a small cottage on the lane between Eppleby and Winston Gate – the splendidly-named Pudding Hill Lane.

“The cottage is next to the lane down to Barforth Hall,” he says. “Elands have been born in that house back to the 1600s and the last was in 1932 – me.

“I was educated at Eppleby school, went to Forcett church, played football for Eppleby FC, cricket for Forcett Park and won the Christmas handicap at darts in the Cross Keys in Eppleby when under age – that’s my claim to fame.

“When I went to school, Eppleby had two pubs, two shops, a chapel, a fish and chip shop, a blacksmith, two schools, a tennis court, a village pump that worked, a cobbler, and a beck where you catch trout if you were quicker than the policeman who also lived in the village.

“And it had a bus service that got so full on a weekend night back from Darlington that half-a-dozen of the lads had to get off and push it up Carlbury bank from Piercebridge.

“Those were the days.”